Armed crime is rising sharply in a country that once prided itself on its law-abiding orderliness

ONE midnight last month, two brothers and another man went on a killing spree with a double-barrelled shotgun in Dayukou, a mining village 500km (310 miles) south-west of Beijing. Within an hour they had killed 14 people and seriously injured three others. Among the casualties were four village officials.

China once haughtily regarded crimes involving guns as a manifestation of American decadence that hardly affected its own, better regulated, society. In urban China at least, this may have been true a decade or more ago. But now even official publications admit that the numbers of gun-related crimes are soaring—though they are still far less common than in the United States—and that a huge black market has developed for everything from shotguns to fully automatic assault rifles.

Official figures offer no basis for useful comparisons with America. China's police release only minimal statistics. These do not include the number of people killed or injured by gunfire, or the number of crimes involving firearms. “The government thinks it's a government affair,” says Bai Jianjun, a criminologist at Beijing University. The only gun-related figure included is the number of cases involving breaches of the firearms regulations— 26,456 last year, up nearly 7%. But these cover only misdemeanours such as unregistered possession of a hunting gun. Moreover they include only those cases that the police have chosen to investigate—and a book published last year by the Chinese People's Public Security University suggests that even among serious offences (of any type) only 30% of reported crimes are in fact investigated.

Less official sources offer occasional clues. According to China News Week, more than 500 police officers died in the line of duty last year, up from about 360 in 1996. The magazine quoted “experts” as saying the increase was related to the rise in armed crime. Another report, published in May, said that armed crimes increased by 26% in 1994. Despite a national campaign in 1994 to tighten control of firearms, armed crimes rose a further 19.5% the next year. In the first half of the 1990s, said a study published in 1998, more than 10,000 armed crimes were recorded, two-thirds of all violent crimes in China.

China certainly has stricter gun-control regulations than the United States, including a law introduced in 1996 which stipulates that even the crude hunting guns commonly used in the countryside must be registered with the police. But criminals determined to acquire a gun can do so with relative ease. Soaring demand for firearms has ensured a good supply. Many are smuggled in from Vietnam and Myanmar, and increasing numbers come from the Central Asian states. Others are manufactured illegally in China itself, or stolen from the sometimes ill-guarded stores of rural militias and the police. Chinese military pistols were used in a series of crimes in Hong Kong this year.

Demand for firearms is being fuelled mainly by a surge in organised crime. Having prided itself on all but wiping out criminal secret societies after the Communist takeover in 1949, the government admits they are now coming back with a vengeance. The police in Fujian province, on the coast facing Taiwan, say they have evidence of over 40 Japanese, American and Taiwanese triads operating there. The gangs are usually supported by corrupt officials, including police.

Members are recruited both from the growing ranks of the urban poor—the millions who have lost their livelihoods as a result of economic reforms—and among the rural unemployed, tens of millions of whom have been drifting into urban areas in recent years in search of work. The gangs engage in kidnappings and robbery. They smuggle drugs and guns and run the burgeoning sex industries of urban China.

Organised crime has even penetrated the party elite. Last month, courts sentenced 16 officials for involvement in corruption involving organised crime in the large city of Shenyang in the north-east. Among them were the former mayor and a deputy mayor. Both received death sentences, though the ex-mayor's was suspended for two years. Dozens more officials are expected to be tried.

Most residents of big cities in China, though increasingly worried about burglary and mugging, are not especially concerned about gun-related violence. In rural areas and smaller towns, however, armed attacks and robberies are becoming increasingly common. Ill-protected rural banks are frequent targets, especially during the lean winter months. In May, the authorities executed 14 members of a gang accused of a series of murders and bank robberies in central and southern China. They allegedly had an arsenal of 15 military guns, 23 shotguns, a hand grenade and two anti-tank grenades.

Since early this year, the police have been engaged in one of their periodic “strike hard” campaigns against crime. The figures hint at the scale of the problem. Even in the well-ordered capital, the police seized over 100 hand grenades and 1,500 guns of various kinds between April and August. In the country as a whole, they confiscated 600,000 guns, including 8,800 military weapons, between March and June. That brings the total for the past five years to an extraordinary 2.4m guns. How many more are still out there?